Former LeFlore High School standout DeMarcus Cousins is the object of a teaching moment in one of the first excerpts released from Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari's book "Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out." The book went on sale Tuesday, and Calipari is sharing bits of the book through his web site to encourage online sales.

In the excerpt released on Friday, Calipari relates how he approached Cousins when the prize recruits stopped partway through a conditioning drill, saying, "My feet are on fire!"

Calipari writes that his team has to go through 15 conditioning drills before practice starts. On the first day of the drills, Calipari writes that Cousins stopped and made his fiery-feet declaration. "Everything stopped for a moment, like it does when there's a car accident and traffic comes to a standstill," Calipari wrote.

After getting the players, including other celebrated freshmen John Wall and Eric Bledsoe, back on track, Calipari approached Cousins:

"I turned around, and DeMarcus was sitting against a wall. He had his shoes off. I walked over there and he said it again: 'My feet are on fire!'

"I said to him very calmly, 'DeMarcus, you didn't make that run, so you know you're going to have to make it up. And to be honest with you, I'm OK with that. I know you've got a long way to go. But you do know that you will never start for this basketball team if you can't do the conditioning and you're not in shape. You know that, right? You'll come off the bench, and if you're playing well and in shape, might play 30 minutes. But if you're not, you'll come off the bench and you'll play eight minutes. Either way, you can never start here. You do know that, right?'

"He made every conditioning drill after that, every single one. It was one of those things where I could have gone crazy on him. And believe me, I do go crazy sometimes. But right then he just needed to know that, number one, respect what we're doing here. We're a team, we're in this together, and it's not going to work if one guy is sitting down with his shoes off. And number two, I wanted him to feel like I cared about him enough to encourage him to do the right thing. We were all just getting started and getting to know one another. I didn't need to humiliate him. I trusted him to know what he had to do. If I didn't believe that, I would never have recruited him."

Cousins initially committed to UAB as a LeFlore senior. But when UAB would not assure him that he would be released from his letter of intent if coach Mike Davis was let go, Cousins chose not to sign with the Blazers. He committed to Calipari at Memphis, instead. When the coach left Memphis for Kentucky, Cousins' commitment followed Calipari to the Wildcats.

"When I was recruiting DeMarcus," Calipari wrote, "I knew he was not choosing a college without his mother's approval. When I asked her why she had sent him to me, she said, 'Because he respected you as a coach, and I knew you weren't afraid of him.'"

Cousins played one season at Kentucky, earning the SEC Freshman of the Year Award, before being chosen with the fifth pick in the 2010 NBA Draft by the Sacramento Kings. He completed his fourth season as the Kings center earlier this week. He averaged 22.7 points and 11.7 rebounds per game in the 2013-14 season.